Tag Archives: 3D printing

Peering into the future of 3D printing: Q&A with Graduate Industrial Design Chair, Andy Ogden

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The Dotted Line: What can 3D printing technology do?

Andy Ogden: The technology can make a solid 3D ( material)  model (output) of anything one can imagine in a 3D modeling program—from cookies, to doorstops to rocket engine tooling.
These machines churn out working prototypes (not just models) made from solid usable parts. This technology is especially valuable for making models, mockups and prototypes that do not require the time or labor traditionally necessary to achieve a similar result.

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‘Insights’ highlights: 108 high-intensity doses of creative inspiration in 130 characters or less

Alum Lynne Aldrich leads a tour of her sculpture exhibit in the Williamson Gallery

Alum Lynne Aldrich leads a tour of her sculpture exhibit in the Williamson Gallery

While Car Classic dominated last weekend’s headlines, with its lineup of head-turning, high-revving art-imitates-life works of automotive aesthetics and ingenuity. Sunday’s auto design showcase wasn’t even the only audacious display of Art Center’s creative assets on view last weekend. On Saturday, the College hosted a curated selection of seminars and workshops known as Art Center Insights. The invitation-only event offers donors and trustees an opportunity to experience what it’s like to be Art Center student for an afternoon (minus the mountain of pressure to complete competing creative projects). 

After a lunch in the student dining room with President Lorne M. Buchman, participants chose from the following Session 1 presentations: 3D Printing: A Revolution in 3D, Environmental Design: The Safe Aqua Project and Interaction Design: Evolving User Experience. Then came the second and final round of workshops: Transportation Design/Sustainability: Nature, The Mobility Innovator, Photography: Portraiture Unplugged and Fine Art: Lynn Aldrich: Un/Common Objects.

Because Insights reaches only a small slice of the population who might benefit from it; we embedded reporters in each of the workshops and live-tweeted the entire event. Taken together, these concise dispatches offer a cohesive (if not comprehensive) narrative of what it was like to experience Insights and the inspiring ideas and tools exchanged over the course of all six workshops.

Some people dream of being king for a day. But Insights makes a good case for the rewards that go along with being a student, for a day or a lifetime. Hopefully the chronicle below will conjure some of that mind-expanding thrill vicariously.

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Art Center student’s crowd-funded project Ribbon envisions a cleaner, brighter future for sunglasses

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Somewhere in some secret underground research facility an engineer is probably developing a pair of nanotechnology-infused lenses that will make cleaning our sunglasses a thing of the past.

But until that day becomes a reality, we’ll have to make do wiping our shades with napkins, T-shirts or whatever abrasive cloth we can find in the moment. Right?

Not if Patrick McCrory has anything to say about it.

Today, the Interaction Design student is launching a campaign on crowd-funding platform Indiegogo for his project Ribbon Sunglasses, which feature a retractable microfiber cloth tucked away inside the frame.

The concept lands squarely in “How has nobody thought of this before?” terrain, in that it offers a deceptively simple solution to a problem nearly everybody can relate to. But the journey McCrory’s project has taken from initial idea to crowd-funded campaign is far from straightforward.

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For Deezmaker’s Diego Porqueras, the Path to 3D Printing Began With a Film Course

Diego Porqueras, along with Bukobot-printed 3D objects, at his Deezmaker store in Pasadena.

Diego Porqueras, along with Bukobot-printed 3D objects, at his Deezmaker store in Pasadena.

These days 3D printing is everywhere. Creatives are using this emerging technology to make everything from fashion gowns to gummy replicas of themselves. Even the President mentioned it in his most recent State of the Union address.

One man who’s made quite a name for himself in this burgeoning arena is Diego Porqueras, inventor of the BukoBot 3D printer and the president and founder of Deezmaker, a 3D printer store and hackerspace in Pasadena. Surprisingly enough, the path that led Porqueras into this brave new world began with an Art Center at Night (ACN) film course he took 13 years ago.

“I took Basics of Film with Robert Mehnert and that ended up being a big turning point in my career,” says Porqueras, who said he already had some experience making movies prior to the class but that the course provided him with a better grasp of the basics.

But that wasn’t the turning point. That happened when an ACN classmate who was working as a production assistant told the class he was leaving the country for two weeks and asked if anybody would be interested in taking his place on a few productions. “I was the first guy to raise my hand for that,” says Porqueras with a laugh.

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